Elias PetropoulosElias Petropoulos (1928-2003) was the most controversial Greek writer of the twentieth century. Imprisoned three times during the Junta (1967-1974) and persecuted by Greek judges as late as the 1980s, this "urban folklorist" produced a vast and grounbreaking oeuvre that continues to provoke extreme reactions from readers. The author of some seventy books on topics ranging from prisons, brothels, graveyards, hats, moustaches, homosexual slang and Turkish coffee to rebetic songs, architecture and the plight of Greek Jews during the Second World War, Petropoulos was also and perhaps above all a poet. He wrote his first long poetic sequence, Funeral Oration, when he was thirty-nine years old, just after the Colonels had seized power. In the following decades, most of which were spent in exile in Paris (where he began living in 1975), Petropoulos produced more poetry, often in spurts of highly concentrated energy. He died in Paris on September 3, 2003. Read More Read Less